When Trump made the choice to go to war with Iran based on a lie, he did it because those who should know better allowed him to. Unfortunately, in the West, we live in a world obsessed with the here and now and short-term gains. The whole US economic model is based on making a quick buck. It’s sort of the economic equivalent of ‘shoot first, ask questions later’.
I am firmly of the opinion that, despite the outward-facing sense of bravado from the regime, they know electoral defeat is staring them in the face. I watched with great interest yesterday as King Charles III addressed the joint session of Congress. For the sake of clarity, let me say that, as a Brit, I am not a royalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought his speech, both in Congress and later at the state dinner, represented a master class in the art of diplomacy.
Rarely these days do we see pitch-perfect oratory, but King Charles was certainly on his A-game. His carefully crafted, exquisitely delivered words were monologues sprinkled with rebukes of Mad King Don's policies. The two speeches were littered with ‘the art of cerebral condemnation’, which I’m sure remained undetected by Wun Dum Fuc, as I occasionally like to refer to Trump. These were speeches where, only after careful thought and reflection, would one ask, “Was I being chastised?”
Putting pageantry aside, as a result of Trump’s imbecilic foreign policy car crash, the world economy now finds itself on a runaway train heading towards a global recession. All the while, the President of the United States waffles on about his ballroom while attempting to sell the world on social Darwinism as the way forward. There’s a lot of understandable frustration and despair out there because the walls of financial distress are beginning to squeeze 90% of Americans through no fault of their own.
What deeply concerns me is that the current levels of economic discomfort are nothing compared to the full impact potentially coming down the track. It has always been the case that actions have consequences, but these consequences are entirely self-inflicted at a time when those at the bottom are in financial freefall.
There are two sides to this story, so let’s focus first on the domestic challenges. I want to begin by dealing with the heart of the problem. In the so-called land of the free, Americans are constantly told that the sole key to prosperity is hard work. If people put in enough hours, they too can live the American dream. If hard work were directly related to wealth, then single moms working three jobs to put food on the table would be in the top 10%. The premise is nonsense and has always been nonsense.
It’s time to stop with the fairytales and face the uncomfortable truth that at the root of all this systemic economic subjugation is corporate welfare. If you look at the current wealth gap, it doesn’t take a social science major with an economics degree to understand that when the top 1% own a record 31.8% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% own just 2.5%, it’s NOT about hard work; it’s about exploitation and inherited privilege, which brings with it wealth.
According to Pew Research, in 2025 alone, the top 1% collectively increased their wealth by a staggering $689 billion. It has long been said, ‘If only we could get the rich to pay their fair share, life would be better for all.’ I would argue that if we could just get them to pay the tax they are known to evade, currently estimated at $1 trillion annually, it would be a starting point. To put this in perspective, tax evasion alone exceeds the annual war budget. I have written at length about the fact that if the IRS simply collected evaded tax payments from the wealthy elite, the US could eradicate homelessness, food insecurity, and restore the Obamacare subsidies on health insurance that now deny so many access to healthcare.
It’s always difficult to get numbers for addressing structural socioeconomic deficiencies, but even the highest estimates indicate that eradicating poverty in the US would cost less than half of the value of tax evasion by the rich. This regime has been obsessed with waste, fraud, and abuse, yet it seems their donors are the biggest perpetrators of that which they seek to eliminate.
The claim is always that recipients of welfare payments are part of a highly organised crime gang seeking to defraud the US taxpayer. These claims are much like non-citizens voting, political scare stories that simply serve to demonise the poor with no data to support the claims.
In a PBS article by Lennlee Keep on May 15th 2023, she notes:
A common mindset through modern American history is that people living in poverty simply don’t want to work.¹ For decades, politicians have used programs like food stamps, unemployment, social security, and Section 8 housing not as examples of a social good, but of lazy people wanting free money from harder-working taxpayers.
She goes on to make the important point that:
“Despite the fact that white Americans benefit more from government assistance than people of color, means-tested aid is primarily associated with Black people and other people of color—particularly when the term welfare is used,” wrote political scientist Ashley Jardina for TalkPoverty. “For many Americans, the word welfare conjures up a host of disparaging stereotypes so strongly linked to stigmatized beliefs about racial groups that—along with crime—it is arguably one of the most racialized terms in the country.”
The key here is that the vulnerable in society all too often have no voice, so they are powerless to defend themselves against political narratives seeking a soft target to present as a sacrificial lamb to American voters. It’s the classic Republican tactic of wrapping a grain of truth in a liberal coating of lies to achieve a political objective. Welfare recipient fraud accounts for little more than a rounding error, and yet those forced to claim welfare are the prime targets of a perpetual right-wing-driven scapegoat narrative.
Is welfare fraud a big problem? You bet your life it is, but it has little to do with individual recipients and everything to do with systemic corporate-driven fraud in the healthcare sector. There is no better example than the current sitting Senator Rick Scott, who, until 1997, was CEO and Chairman of HCA (formerly Columbia/HCA), the largest for-profit health care company in the US.
The company pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to pay over $1.7 billion in criminal fines and civil penalties for systematically overcharging the government, making this the largest healthcare fraud case in U.S. history.
HCA admitted to a long list of charges, including submitting inflated bills and expenses to the government for payment; exaggerating the seriousness of diagnoses to increase Medicare reimbursement; illegally structuring business deals so that Medicare picked up the cost of corporate expenses; and providing doctors with kickbacks for patient referrals.
Despite being CEO and Chairman, and with the company running two sets of books to facilitate the crime, Scott claimed to know nothing about what had occurred and, as a result, was allowed to resign, walking away with $10 million in severance pay, a five-year consulting contract, and $300 million in stock and options. Don’t let anyone tell you crime doesn’t pay.
If you want to save billions of dollars of taxpayer money, can I respectfully suggest that targeting the vulnerable is simply a distraction to create a permissive environment for government contractors like healthcare providers and defence contractors to fleece the US taxpayer with total impunity? These corporate entities are not competing in a real free market; they are societal parasites suckling at the public purse with almost zero oversight.
We are tackling economic inequality from the completely wrong angle. The truth is that there would be no need for SNAP and tax credits if employers simply paid all staff a living wage. The argument, of course, is that if employers did this, they would have to lay off staff, adding to the unemployment numbers. Surely the position should be that if you can’t operate a business without corporate welfare, which is what these payments are, then the business is not viable. All indications are that the bulk of corporate America is nonviable without taxpayer subsidies. That’s a structural problem, I’m afraid. The whole reason we are witnessing this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top is that corporate welfare is, quite literally, the vehicle that facilitates it.
The harsh reality is that the wealth gap has accelerated so quickly, it has all but extinguished the middle class and left everyone in the bottom 50% fighting over the scraps from the rich man’s table. In 2026, 67% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Current data shows that a third of Americans would struggle to cover a $400 unexpected bill, and that number rises to 60% if the bill were $1,000. With around 37% living below the poverty line, nobody in their right mind can claim America is the greatest country in the world. It’s become the United Economic Slave Cononies of America
From a fiscal perspective, where only the top 20% have any semblance of resilience to economic shocks, if you’re in the bottom 80%, the inbound fallout from the economic shock of this self-inflicted wound that is the Iran War should be of grave concern.
In the final part of this piece, we’ll take a close look at the economic structural fault lines that would result from a potential significant market correction. Also, we’ll examine the geopolitical implications. One thing the wider American public can take away from where we are in this moment is that it is unquestionably the result of gross economic malpractice from a regime that has lost its way on the American taxpayer's dime. In that respect, 70 million Americans have only themselves to blame for electing a convicted criminal. As for the rest, welcome to the consequences.
Why do we see this so clearly and understand your summations so well and yet feel like we're alone in quicksand? I can't wait until November and hope our votes are undeniably STRONG. We'll be up to our necks in total disaster by then.
The whole world has been taken hostage by Trumps war on Iran and the subsequent closure of the strait of Hormuz.